


The Mirror of Erised

by in_a_different_box_to_you



Series: Harry Potter and the Broken Mirror [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-06 18:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8763532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/in_a_different_box_to_you/pseuds/in_a_different_box_to_you





	1. Prologue

Agnes Stevens, née Malfoy, sometimes wishes she’d kept the only tangible connection she had to the strangers who had conceived, given birth to and then abandoned her. She knows it’s irrational, when the nurses at Wiltshire County Hospital had to coax her tiny infant brain back into the living world after the local priest tripped over her on the steps of the village church one morning in January. And when she was told later that the scars on her arms were there before she was discovered, at six in the morning during her second year in this life, blue and shaking with cold. 

 

She wishes it most passionately now for her daughter’s sake, as Lyra arranges her spaghetti hoops into a smiley face and garbles on about a strange boy called Draco Malfoy who vanished into thin air and is suddenly so completely bewitched by the idea of her secret family magically appearing and disappearing out there somewhere. ‘Lyra Malfoy’ is charmingly gothic compared to ‘Lyra Stevens’ of Little Whinging, Surrey. 

 

So she googles the name ‘Draco Malfoy’ and gets a few irrelevant results for ‘Malfoy’ and a single Australian artist called ‘Draco James’. She adds ‘Wiltshire’ and gets a single hit. It is a page from the archive of the _Wiltshire Times_ , with a photograph of an article dated the 1st of November, 1981. She deciphers the blurred text with difficulty. The reporter describes an alteration between the ‘child prodigy' Draco Malfoy of ‘the manor’, aged one, and a strangely dressed man who promptly _vanished into thin air_ when questioned by a citizen concerned for the boy’s welfare. The child’s father appears, ‘as if from nowhere’ and removes his son from the scene. There is some speculation about the motives of the stranger, but the author concludes that he must have been a stage magician, with his pointed hat and colourful robes, who was entertaining ‘young master Malfoy’ with tricks when the boy, in his ‘extraordinary maturity for one so young’ discerned ‘some treachery’. Agnes rereads the passage several times, annoyed by the limited information about the boy’s family. Beyond the reference to ‘his father’, and ‘the manor’, there is no tangible information beyond references to what was obviously common knowledge among the community about Draco’s intelligence. 

 

She clicks fruitlessly through the archive, but finds that it doesn’t date back any further than January of the same year and there are no further references to the Malfoys or the manor. 

 

‘Malfoy Manor’ yields the same link to the archive and a single pixelated image of a derelict Georgian building decked rather sinisterly with police tape. A permanent looking sign reads ‘Crime Scene. Keep Out’ in the bottom corner. Intrigued, she looks up trains to Wiltshire for Friday evening. She smiles and changes the search parameters to after Lyra’s school’s home time, remembering that the Christmas holidays were almost upon them. 

 

In the room across the hall, her daughter dreams of ancient castles, elf-like creatures and a pale family below a starry sky. She awakes, frustrated that, despite her pleading, these people wouldn't look up to see the beauty spread out above them. When she drops off once more, she dreams of flying. 


	2. The Deathday Party

Draco Malfoy, aged 18, has closeted himself in the linen cupboard of one Malfoy Manor. He’s curled within a cocoon of blankets and pillows which lets in enough light to create an insular blue glow inside, amongst the heap of muggle second hand books with titles like _Dragon Rider, Inkheart, The Fifth Elephant, The Hobbit, Wolf Brother,_ and _Alice through the Looking Glass -_ he has become addicted to muggle children’s fantasy. Beside him, an intricate bronze contraption tinkles softly, churning out softly steaming mugs of fruit and herb teas which are offered to his foetal form by a mechanical arm momentarily before they are banished and replaced by a different flavour. The boy will occasionally take a sip from the proffered beverage, unconcerned by the change in taste of each mouthful as he negotiates worlds of dragons, goblins and werewolves and pretends his own world is just as unreal.

 

Outside the small wooden door, the steam of so many mugs of boiling water curls through the keyhole and tangles with the smokey forms of ghosts gliding through the chilly corridors of damp stone, passing through decaying canvases and rotting doors in an eternal funeral procession. The scent of lemon, ginger and camomile sours with the stench of dark magic which clings to the tarnished silver and doxy-ridden curtains.

 

Shards of glass glitter across the floorboards below the mutilated faces of clocks, frozen mid-tick or mid-chime in the first few days of total silence the manor has experienced since wizards first adopted the muggle timekeeping device in the fourteenth century. 

 

Outside, long white peacock feathers lie trodden into the mud, their owners now small matted heaps strewn across the dying grass. The Death Eaters killed them for target practice. 

 

High up among the turrets, a woman lies dead, one hand hanging, dropped an inch above the floor.

 

 

 

 

Lyra begins levitating in her sleep.

 

The first time this happens, Agnes simply switches out the light, because the child inside of her doesn’t think such things are extraordinary at all. Then she does a double take and stands in the doorway for a solid three minutes watching her daughter float a foot in the air, her peaceful face illuminated in the shaft of moonlight that has slid between the curtains. 

 

In the end, they drive to Wiltshire. The train is too complicated with it’s three changes and massive detour through little out of the way towns. Lyra’s still in school uniform, her school bag at her feet. She’s reading Roald Dahl’s _The Magic Finger_ which is research, she tells her mother. 

 

When Agnes thinks about it, late at night when her husband snores loudly beside her, she find’s the whole thing very disturbing. If there are people out there who can appear and disappear at will and goodness knows what else, people who’s contact with her daughter has had her floating in mid air, then who knows what they could do. That kind of ability to overcome the laws of physics is dangerous - like nuclear weapons, she thinks. A force your average citizen is defenceless against, their lives in the hands of a few strangers living very different lives to the mere mortals just trying to get by. 

 

Rain begins to lash the windscreen and all around, head lamps and traffic lights slither through the water, blurred by the mist, then sharpened as the light refracts within each droplet on the glass. If magic existed, _real_ magic, then would little things like this loose their beautiful fantasy? Lyra breaths condensation over her window and wipes her hand through it. With carefully placed fingertips, she transforms the resulting shape into a dog. The drawing flashes light and dark as cars flicker past. 

 

“Mummy, do you think if we tried hard enough, we could…” she trailed off, the clapped her hands, sudden and loud over the soothing monotone growl of the engine, “Just vanish?”

 

“I don’t think so,” Agnes answers, smiling, and then because it is too ludicrous to contemplate the consequences, she adds, “But maybe _you_ could, Lyra.”

 

She watches the edge of Lyra’s lips turn up as she stares out through the rain.

 


	3. Far out of reach; Prettier than ever

Draco has been hiding from his own, swirling, silver memories since he staggered back up the drive three weeks ago having just apparated from Kings Cross, to discover his mother cold and dead in his parent’s bed. He’d run, like a child, towards the house, flinging the front doors wide with a crash of exploding dust and then stumbling up staircases and through corridors to their room. At first, he slowed so as not to wake her sleeping form. Then a cobweb spun from her fine grey hair, over her still, dry lips, and to the open curtains, caught the light from his wand. Closer, _Lumos_ illuminated a shroud knitted over her torso. A spider crawled over her clasped hangs. Draco thought, absurdly, of Miss Havisham. He picked up his mother’s cold dead hand and cradled it like the skeleton of a baby bird. The light flickered and then he huddled there, alone for the first time in his parent’s bedroom, clinging to a corpse. 

 

Since then, he’s been trying to remember her last words to him and his reply, but for the life of him, he can’t. He replays the moments before he left for Hogwarts that one final time, listening for her rasping, papery voice and hoping it will drown out the screams of Hermione Granger on the drawing room floor, the rasp of Peter Petegrew strangling himself on the cellar stairs or Charity Burbage’s pleads of mercy above the dining table (or his own voice, panicked as he stared at the mangled face of the one person who had ever really _mattered_ and saying ‘I can’t be sure’, when of course he would have seen those eyes behind his own for each of the nights they were parted by more that just hatred, more than just distance…).

 

Then there are the ghosts, real and here, always and eternal as he passes through their anti-masses hanging like veils across the hall and shivers in the chill. Today, they are transparent and insubstantial in the sudden sunlight from the rain-slashed windows but, in darkness, they can be as opaque as his own body, pale against the night. Sometimes he wonders if he’s another spirit walking among the dead - another heroic victim of Voldemort. Sometimes he hopes. 

 

He looks into each of their faces for Narcissa’s. Each of their faces jolts a memory of strangers. 

 

The manor looks strange in the sunlight, all contrasts and film noir. Passing the warm shafts from the windows makes stepping through the shadows feel like stepping through ghosts, occasionally literally. So he settles on a window seat looking over the lawn, folding himself in his dressing gown and watches the snow sparkle from where it’s been scraped over the grass. His eyes narrow as he notices movement beyond the gates. The figures of a mother and child approach the manor. Their hair is startlingly blond against the dark of the trees. _It’s us,_ Draco thinks, _Coming back from the morning constitutional on Christmas day, the year of my seventh birthday, the year Mother took me outside while Father punished Dobby, did God knows what that I wasn’t allowed to see because I’d unwrapped my new racing broom to find a scratch through the wood._ He remembered the house elf coming to his bedroom with hot chocolate and blood soaking through his pillowcase that evening, and rolling over so that he didn’t have to look, rolling over so that his back was turned on the small humanoid who was trapped, alone and enslaved, broken because Draco had dropped the broom in fright when he was interrupted poking around in his father’s study. Interrupted by Dobby coming to wrap the presents. So Draco turned his back on the evidence of his cowardice, pounded into the defence less body of his only friend. 

 

 

It has taken Agnes all day just to figure out the location of the ruin known as Malfoy Manor. She spent most of the morning going through parish records in various towns whilst distractingly boring old ladies offered endless cups of tea and plied Lyra with biscuits. The attraction of what Lyra had envisioned as some kind of treasure hunt, like in one of her books, seemed to have wained considerably by lunch. 

 

There was something spooky about the lack of references to Malfoy Manor in the paperwork which covered everything from the birth of individual children to their funerals a little further down the line. The records thinned out about two centuries previous, with a single poster for a village fate for 1769 in a folder at the bottom of the last ring binder. It was a yellowed page advertising the ‘Magical Acts of Daedalus Diggle the Third’. 

It is Lyra who spotted the name Malfoy amongst a pencilled list of land owners in the folder for 1800-1805. _Septimus Malfoy,_ it read, _Malfoy Manor,_ then, finally, a grid reference. At first, it seemed as if the author had made an error with their hastily scribbled numbers, the only thing marked on Agnes’ map in the identified square was a picnic area. They spent a frustrating hour or so driving and then walking around trying to find something more significant in the space. Agnes finally came to the conclusion that the meadow was exactly what it seemed - a waterlogged field with some drowning benches. 

 

They returned to the records. She was riffling desperately through the folder again for a different, more accurate clue when she knocked 1805-1810 onto the floor. When she leant down to recollect its contents, she discovered a map of the Wiltshire of that time, drawn rather shakily in sepia ink. Lyra perked up at the sight of such an aesthetically _adventurous_ artefact. Excitedly, they laid both old and new maps side by side on the table. The grid lines and numbers had to have moved a lot in the time between this long dead geographer scratching out the lands of their home and modern satellite cartography software churning out one of many OS maps. Using the town centre as a guide, leaning over her daughter’s shoulder, Agnes lined maps up then found the grid reference in the hand-drawn map. A small ‘x’ marked ‘Malfoy Manor’ in spindly letters. It could not get more _Treasure Island_ than that. In the corresponding spot on the new map, a ruin was marked, one of hundreds scattered over the countryside, entirely unremarkable to the casual observer.

 

And if the name vanished when Agnes removed her hand from Lyra’s shoulder, then Agnes didn’t notice. 


	4. A Riddle House

Malfoy Manor looks no better in the sudden sunlight than it had online. The police tape is scattered over the cracked stone steps by a howling wind, the windows boarded up or else shattered into jagged teeth around the flaking panes and the corpses of what look, bizarrely, like peacocks as white as ghosts festoon the unkempt lawn. 

 

Agnes follows Lyra’s small figure as they pick their way through the debris and over a line, somewhere amongst the rubbish, between inside and out, observer and trespasser, onto the outside of the law. Agnes wonders, absently, if she has ever intentionally done anything illegal before. She can’t remember, so it probably didn’t feel like a big deal then. Then again, she probably wasn’t leading her daughter along too. 

 

The tangled remains of a chandelier quivers on a fragment of plaster high above. Agnes backs out from under it, joining Lyra out under the gaping hole in the ceiling and into the start of the rain. They both look up, watching droplets from the grey gash above dive through layers and layers of deceased decadence up to the disintegrated slates of the roof. A massive four-poster bed is half falling from the fourth floor, a bookcase leans precariously over the edge a bit higher up, the water glistening in the air as it splashes off it’s polished top, and a stuffed bear lies across the rift on the top floor, sagging slightly with sopping fur. Agnes staggers back, experiencing a strange sense of inverted vertigo and trips, falling backwards onto a decaying heap of pigeons and screams slightly, squeakily. She feels, with horror, the damp, soft cloying feathers cushioning her fall and screws her eyes shut. Lyra’s hands find hers and help her up. 

 

When she can bare to look, shuddering involuntarily, she is distracted from the heap of corpses, suddenly vanished, by the complete transformation of her surroundings. 

 

She stands hand in hand with her daughter on the landing of a beautiful relic of times lost. A banister shimmers darkly in the darkness as it winds up, higher and higher up to the perfectly serviceable roof far above. Looking back, the entrance hall glimmers green from the massive sash windows on the thick Persian carpets. Above, the chandelier sparkles emerald, intact and alive in the dancing shadows of chiaroscuro. 

 

When she reaches back, to lean against the wall, to take it all in, to close her eyes tight once more and then open them to - to a heap of mutilated pigeons stewed together with the occasional seagull and half devoured by maggots. Lyra, beside her a moment ago, has gone.

 

The stairway, the carpets, everything, gone. The chandelier swings ominously above. 

 

She squints up again, up to the darkening sky. She begins to panic, convinced that Lyra is up there, somehow. That she had, impossibly, climbed the non-existent staircase and is now unreachable in the shadows on a floor above. When she calls, “LYRA!” it’s a quiet, raspy and slightly broken ghost of a scream.

 

Agnes runs over heaps of rubble, trips over threads of unwound tapestries, stumbles through fallen walls and collapsed furniture in a futile search of the accessible ruin and cries out dead whispers to her child. She’s thoroughly lost and practically outside once more in the pouring rain somewhere completely unrecognisable, feeling like she’s stepped into one of those teen apocalypse films when she hears the scream.

 

Lyra’s scream.

 

The world shifts before Agnes’ eyes. Flickering between every repeated note, the illusion or the reality only sustained by Lyra’s voice. But all that, all this magic stuff, vanishes from Agnes’ mind asshe catches a glimpse through the window of the ground far below and she charges down the corridor ahead, realising that, somehow, she is upstairs. 

 

The world blinks around her as she follows the wavering screams. She runs through the flashes of the ruined building, where she is falling through mid air, and this cold, clammy corridor panelled with wooden illustrations of what seem to be moving snakes, coiling around the corners of her vision. Her footsteps perform percussion on the stone floor one moment, then she’s tripping on the steps which are literally missing. But she can hear Lyra crying, “MUMMY!” louder now, just around the corner. 

 

She flings herself through the next doorway and into a massive bedroom, throwing herself at her daughter, who is cowering in the corner, pointing a shaking finger at the bed. Agnes clutches Lyra to her chest, turning -

 

A woman lies on the bed. 

 

Or what is left of her.

 

A skeleton lies on the bed, masquerading as a woman through a tattered mask of flesh.

 

Lyra shakes in her arms. 

 

Footsteps clatter outside, approaching as mother and daughter back into the corner, shrouded in the condensation of their own breath.

 

A figure looms through the doorway, raising their arm to point something long and threatening at the child - 

 

Who vanishes. 


	5. In Pieces Again

 

“Shit.” Says Draco Malfoy, eloquently. His wand falls from his fingers and clatters loudly on the floor. 

 

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO YOU CREEP WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO TO MY DAUGHTER WHERE HAVE YOU GOT HER YOU BRING HER BACK YOU BRING HER BACK YOU BRING HER BACK YOU - ” The muggle woman breaks off mid shout to bend forward, wheezing, eyes wild, the child’s hands falling floppily onto the carpet. 

 

“Shit.” Says Draco Malfoy, unhelpfully. 

 

She makes a high keening noise, her eyes screwed tight. He kneels down, reaching out to comfort her then thinking better of it when she flinches away. “Listen, is there any particular place where your daughter - “

 

“Lyra.” The woman says quietly.

 

“Where _Lyra_ would go to feel safe?”

 

“LYRA!” She yells, hoarsely, pushing herself up, grasping both of the hands. “LYRA!”

 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Draco scrabbles around for his wand, “Legilimens.” 

 

 

 

Lyra is running, her white blond hair steaming behind like a vapour trail as she _roars_ an ancient battlecry from deep within her stomach and charges down through the forest. The trees dodge past, flickering yellow and black out of the corner of the eye. Her fingers scratch bark, her feet scrape roots and she’s racing the river, tumbling down the hillside yelling ‘BAAAAAAAASOOOOOORAAAAIIIIIIIICH’ or whatever else comes to mind as she’s flung from the trees. Her feet sink into white sand and her eyes into the waves. 

 

 

Her trainers are flipped off her feet, her spear dropped amongst the footprints, but she stands far out to sea, surveying the beach from a craggy fortress, sopping wet and smiling with satisfaction as her parents emerge, staggering, from the forest. An invisible boy stands at her mother’s shoulder. She sings softly, “I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty - ”

 

 

Agnes blinks awake as the Malfoy boy grabs hold of her arm and the world disintegrates - then reforms like a butterfly from a chrysalis into dancing colour and light. The trees pour down into rivulets in the sky, then the ocean crashes down from the clouds and the world rights itself.

 

The rock is about fifty metres out to sea and on it, most of a little girl cradles her wrists in tangles of hair, tangled with blood. 

 

Malfoy raises the stick once more, pointing it at Lyra, those aristocratic lips open and twisting, so Agnes punches him and feels the satisfying crack of his nose echo in her ears followed by the crunch of sand as she wades into the water, waves crashing over her, ready to pluck her daughter out of this world. 

 

“Wingardium leviosa,” says a muffled voice and then Lyra’s rising, red droplets falling from the small figure and into the sea as her feet skim the spray. She floats into Agnes’ frozen arms and _clings_ with arms and legs as if the child has a thousand fingers to grip onto her mother’s shirt. 

 

“I did it,” She whispers as Draco Malfoy points his stick at the stumps and mutters nonsense, back at the beach, mother and daughter staring in fascination as skin knits itself together and blood un-soaks from the sand, “I just… vanished.” 

 

Agnes cradles her head, hands shaking as she wipes the weak red liquid from Lyra’s face. “Just. Don’t do it again.” 


End file.
